Socio-technical Factors Fostering Sustainability in Urban Transportation: A Worldwide Analysis

Socio-technical systems have very complex structure in which multidimensional co-evolutionary dynamics between people and technical factors are presented. Each urban zone has different socio-technical conditions in which the built environment and the user choices are varied. Understanding how urban transportation is shaped by socio-technical factors and how these factors in turn affect the transportation users and the transportation performance worldwide is important in order to support sustainable transportation planning. An integrative literature review and multiple worldwide analysis of transport indicators conducted in the present thesis. Approximately two hundred cities distributed over sixty countries were examined. The present worldwide transport analysis contains socio-information of the population, the working population, the annual growth rate, the income level, the car ownership, the higher education level, and the culture dimensions. On top of that, the analysis contains technical information of the population density, the land area, infrastructure accessibility and infrastructure design parameters. User preferences were assessed through urban travel mode share. Furthermore, in order to assess the transport performance, specific data were used for the analysis such as congestion level, commute distance by modes, transport-related energy consumption and transport-related CO2 emissions of cities. The present thesis aimed to provide a holistic view of socio-technical factors shaping urban transportation for transport planners and local governments. The thesis focused on understanding which alternative transport modes can be sustainable under specific socio-technical conditions and how to attract travellers towards these sustainable modes. The thesis also assessed, under which technical conditions an urban transport system can minimize its socio-economic costs and environmental impacts. Furthermore, interrelations among the socio-technical factors, their influence on the transport users and transportation performance were identified and presented as a scheme in a holistic view.